Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
Search by MSP
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
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Displaying 3485 contributions
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Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Adult Disability Payment”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Thanks for that response. I invite the deputy convener, Jamie Greene, to ask some questions of you.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Okay—good. That is a nice bookend, because we finish as we started, by looking at the governance arrangements.
I thank the Auditor General, Mark MacPherson and Claire Tennyson from Audit Scotland, and Andrew Burns from the Accounts Commission, for their evidence. You have undertaken to have a look at some of our requests for a bit more data. We would very much appreciate it if you could supply us with that, because we will need to consider our next steps in reviewing the findings and recommendations in the report.
We will now have a further evidence session, but I suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses. We will resume in five minutes or so.
11:00 Meeting suspended.11:05 On resuming—
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Graham Simpson wants to come back in with a very quick question.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
That is great, Joe—thank you very much. Yes, I invite the deputy convener, Jamie Greene, to put some questions to you on this and some other areas.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much, Graham. I now invite Colin Beattie to put some questions to our witnesses.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
It is mentioned in the report, is it not, that there can be quite a wide variation from local authority to local authority? What is done to promote good practice? How much networking is there to elevate those examples where things have gone well and where there have been more successful interventions and outcomes compared with those in other areas where there appears to have been fairly minimal activity?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you very much indeed. I will begin by looking at the governance and accountability arrangements. Your report draws attention to the extremely complex governance arrangements that are in place surrounding the Promise. I think that you used the expression “challenging” and said that the attempts so far to address that complex governance landscape have been—again, I will use your word—“insufficient”. Could you expand on that a little bit and give us your understanding of what those governance arrangements are, how they have come about, and what needs to be done to address them?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Improving care experience: Delivering The Promise”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I note that one of your recommendations calls on the Scottish Government, with support from The Promise Scotland, to complete within the next six months—so there is an urgency to this—work to
“review and identify opportunities to streamline the remit, status, and expected impact of governance groups, boards and forums linked to The Promise”,
so you have clearly identified that as requiring urgent attention.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Adult Disability Payment”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you. I will ask you another question to get your response on the record. You will have read the Audit Scotland report on adult disability payment. Do you agree with the recommendations that are made in that report?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
“Adult Disability Payment”
Meeting date: 5 November 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you. That is very helpful. Finally, you have alluded already to the fact that your report makes 58 recommendations across a range of areas. That might not be quite as big a range as you might have liked; nonetheless, 58 is a lot of recommendations. Do you have a view about what the priorities should be for the Scottish Government in the short, medium and long terms? By February of next year, or hopefully even before that, if the Government said, “We accept the recommendations of Edel Harris’s independent review on adult disability payment” and you were in the Government’s shoes, which ones would you look to accelerate and implement in the short term and which ones might be more for the medium and longer terms?
